MIT's OpenCourseWare Project Continues Apace

When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the formation of its OpenCourseWare project, the plan struck some observers as far-fetched.

Putting the instructional material for nearly 2,000 college courses online isn't exactly a simple task. Nearly six years later, though, MIT has lived up to its lofty aspirations. Campus officials say that the university will have digitized and posted material for all of its courses by the end of the year. (The institution has already posted resources from more than 1,400 classes.) When they started the project, MIT administrators predicted that they would need about 10 years to complete it, so this could be the rare institutional endeavor that meets its goal well ahead of schedule.

Of course, the OpenCourseWare program may never really be finished in the traditional sense: New courses will pop up, syllabi will change, and new distribution methods will render others obsolete.

But the announcement still marks a milestone, especially for other institutions -- including the University of Notre Dame, the University of California at Irvine, and Utah State University -- that have followed MIT's lead and started making their own course material available free online.